QuoteI've always been under the impression that Lucasfilm were fairly diligent with with continuity - is there much difference between dealing with them and Fox/ Dark Horse?
They
are very careful, these days. Anybody who has a long-running universe is. But early on, nobody expected the Star Wars movie to become the monster franchise it spawned. Go find the first Marvel comics and look for Jaxx, who was a giant green bunny rabbit. Definitely not canon ...
Same-same elsewhere. Conan the novels don't agree with Conan the movies. People usually address this by saying, "Well, there are many tales of Conan of Cimmeria. Some say he was a pit-fighter, while other say ..." yadda, yadda.
Sometimes, you can reconcile the stuff, sometimes you hit it with a lick and move on, sometimes you just ignore it. That's all you can do.
As to fanboy stuff, I am guilty of it myself. I got action figures in my office. But as a writer, I can't write for the hardcore fanboys -- you can't please them all because they disagree about almost everything, and if make one set happy, another group will be unhappy. Look at the arguments on any online group, and you can't miss what I'm talking about.
"The lint in her pocket was green, because when they were making the jackets, the processing overdye leaked and -- "
"You moron! It was
blue! There's no evidence the dye leaked onto that jacket, and the cloth was from Altair Nineteen, where Indigo is the prevaling hue of all women's jackets, so ..."
You can get wound around your own axle trying to cover every small continuity glitch. Make one guy happy, piss the next guy off. Trust me, I hear from both guys, in detail.
There's a great episode of The Simpsons in which a bunch of fanboys are asking questions of a writer, and the gist of it is like this: Well, on Monday's episode, when whathisname got hit in the ribs, the tone was a C-sharp, but on Friday when the got hit on the same ribs, the tone was a C-major. So ... which one is right?
To which the answer is what Shatner said on that long-ago episode of Saturday Night Live: Hey -- get a life!
I love to put in-jokes and convoluted stuff into my stuff for the fans. In one of the Aliens books -- forgive me, but I don't recall which one -- I had a military unit and three of the guys were named Huey, Dewey, and Louie -- fans who were paying attention caught it.
There's a line I always wanted to use, and I found a way to get away with it. My editor had it blown up and put on her wall: "Eat hot plasma death, alien-scum!"
This is fun.
But guys who are so steeped in a universe that they get into the microscopic details do tend to get obsessive, and you will go crazy trying to please them. I can't afford to lose the brain cells, so I gave that up ...